I quoted CatB multiple times throughout my Masters classes. I also encourage my students to read it when the argument of closed v. open source software is brought up. Alas, I’m just an adjunct or I’d make it a required text for the class.

Don’t sell yourself short….TAoUP broke new ground too…for me, at least. I’d never read a text that provided such articulated insight into the ‘zen’ of the unix mindset/culture. I knew it, and felt it, from personal experience, yet you managed to pluck the right words from the air to render it in literary amber.

CatB was a view on something I genuinely hadn’t thought deeply about, and it sparked something dormant. That’s why I value it over TAoUP.

Jon: …Alas, Iâ€™m just an adjunct or Iâ€™d make it a required text for the class.

That’s a shame. It would make an invaluable text. Try sleeping with someone important ;)

FWIW, CatB and TAoUP were both sourced for the final paper in my undergrad systems development class , when CatB was still hot off the presses, so to speak. Got an A+ on the paper, but of course it’s not published or anything like that. :)

What I find fascinating is that nearly 10 years later, CatB is still very much relevant. Anything written that’s related to computer technology and especially software development that remains relevant for nearly a decade is practically canon.

> Donâ€™t sell yourself shortâ€¦.TAoUP broke new ground tooâ€¦for me, at least. Iâ€™d never read a text that provided such articulated insight into the â€˜zenâ€™ of the unix mindset/culture. I knew it, and felt it, from personal experience, yet you managed to pluck the right words from the air to render it in literary amber.

Actually, while I like TAoUP and consider it valuable, I had read Gancarz’s “The Unix Philosophy” years earlier, and think it is a more concise and in some ways better insight into unix.

>I had read Gancarzâ€™s â€œThe Unix Philosophyâ€ years earlier, and think it is a more concise and in some ways better insight into unix.

More concise, agreed. I knew what an antinomy I was setting up by writing a big book about Unix. I considered it a calculated risk, and one that I think paid off pretty well.

“Better”…well, I’m not going to dispute with anyone who makes that evaluation. Not out of modesty, but because I think Gancarz and I were trying to do somewhat different things. I think we both succeeded in what we set out to do, so “better” turns into an argument about the relative value of our goals.

Better in the sense that it is more generally applicable, more fundamental. TAoUP is in the sense of more immediate usability, especially once you understand the principles, but “The Unix Philosophy” is a clearer exposition of the principles.

I read the free online version of TAoUP and was so impressed I bought the dead tree copy. It is a standard reference on my office bookshelf. I consider it one of a few books that profoundly influenced how I write code and approach problems. The other, strangely, is “Writing Solid Code” (1st Edition) by Steve Maguire, Microsoft Press. Changed the way I wrote C code overnight. TAoUP had a similar effect in how to design solutions.

I use the arguments in that book for textual format over binary ones regularly. It seems a lot of developers are still hung up on the idea that binary is more efficient and easier to manage without seeing the downsides. Very useful especially today in the era of XML becoming the dominant data language.

@Matt: I think the attitude stems from the fact that a lot of developers around today started out as MS-DOS PC users in the 1980s. Although the PC could address 1MB of RAM (640K of RAM, and 384K of ROM) you had to do that in 64K segments and the OS and language tools of the day didn’t make it easy for you to do that, at least not initially. Unix has always used a flat memory model, and the overhead has always been kept to a minimum by using small, single-purpose tools with open interfaces. So the technology really had a large effect on the culture in both cases; then the *BSDs and Linux brought together a sort of mixing pot of PC people and Unix people by making Unixes designed to run on PCs.

Of course, my analysis of the situation may be tainted by my own experiences.

Then again, that can open up at least two cans of philisophical worms, the first being how much understanding can actually go between people, and how much someone who wasn’t there can understand it. Meh, something to be either fuel for crazy dreams, or for someone actually qualified to puzzle out something useful.

>Erm, of course you always have to consider that the ideals and philosophy of any writer always shows in his work.

There’s more to it than that, in this case. It’s not just that I’m a fan of Hayek who happened to wander into analyzing open-source development, it’s that Hayek’s analysis of social implicit knowledge directly gave me the toolkit I needed to understand what I was seeing. So in a sense my “ideals and philosophy” matter less than Hayek’s in this instance.

>What I find fascinating is that nearly 10 years later, CatB is still very much relevant.

but of course. it (and more pungently: HtN Homesteading the Noosphere) was talking to/describing fundamental culture and human traits â€”ur-memesâ€” rather than efflorescences of transient memes. delineating processes rather than ringing the changes on outcomes.